Bay-area Start-up Waggl Raises More than $1 Million in Funding

In just over two months since its official launch, Waggl
– a new breed of communication and crowdsourcing – has $1.1 million in
funds committed for its series seed round. The brainchild of co-founders
at leading human capital management firm Fort
Hill Company, Waggl addresses the shortcomings of today’s methods
for collecting responses and data by equipping C-suite executives, sales
teams, managers and HR with the ability to rapidly crowdsource critical
intelligence, sentiment and unfiltered insights from within their
organizations.

A star studded and carefully selected group of technologists and
investors have joined Waggl to further advise and shape the business for
long-term success. Several of the individuals involved include:

Jeff
Snipes, founder and former CEO of Ninth House, will join Waggl as
investor and executive chairman.

Robert
Hohman, former president of Hotwire; founder and CEO of Glassdoor,
will join Waggl as investor and advisor.

Joe
Abrams, co-founder of Software Toolworks and Intermix, parent
company of Myspace, will join Waggl as a director.

James
Gutierrez, founder, former CEO and chairman of Progreso
Financiero; co-founder and CEO at Insikt, will join Waggl as investor
and advisor.

Ignace
Goethals, former president of Smithkline Beecham Animal Health
Division; former chairman of Allergy Therapeutics, will join Waggl as
investor and a director.

Rob
Bernshteyn, former head of product marketing and management for
SuccessFactors; CEO of Coupa, will join Waggl as an advisor.

Waggl cites a number of factors for driving interest among investors, as
well as the company’s impressive growth, demonstrating the need for
businesses to more effectively surface and utilize the massive amount of
intelligence existing within their organizations. Since launching in
February, the Bay-area start-up has experienced more than a 300 percent
increase in account sign-ups from a range of organizations, in
particular within the healthcare and education fields, including Sanofi,
Lone
Star College Systems and Stanford
Graduate School of Business.

Additionally, the crowdsourcing tool is experiencing a “network effect”
among its user-base, resulting in strong viral adoption. Waggl also
recently rolled out its new freemium pricing model – more information on
pricing can
be found here.

“Since our launch, we’ve seen an enormous uptick in new accounts and a
corresponding effect on existing user activity on the platform, proving
our solution is helping organizations tackle challenges with improving
business operations, customer service and/or general internal
communication and collaboration,” said Michael Papay, CEO of Waggl. “The
funding we’ve raised will help us meet product development requests and
enhance our platform even further, as well as expand our customer base
internationally. The second half of 2014 should be really exciting for
us!”

Waggl has also partnered with Affero
Lab – the largest human capital management firm in Brazil and lead
distributor of SuccessFactors
in South America – to expand the platforms’ offering outside of the U.S.

“There’s a significant opportunity in Brazil and across Latin America
for organizations to leverage Waggl for gathering and prioritizing
intelligence to improve decision making and take on management
challenges,” said Alexandre
Santille, co-CEO of Affero Lab. “We jumped at the chance to be part
of this round and help expand Waggl’s reach on a more global scale.”

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

Investor and Advisor Viewpoints

Jeff Snipes, co-founder of PDI Ninth House

“The ability to ask smart questions and receive accurate and valuable
insight rapidly is perhaps a CEO’s greatest tool for navigating the
complex and constantly changing business landscape. No other platform
puts this power in the hands of business leaders as simply and elegantly
as Waggl… it truly is a human search engine.”

Joe Abrams, co-founder of Intermix, parent company of Myspace

“Over the last few decades, I was fortunate to have been one of the
early pioneers of the software industry and then again in the social
networking space. I believe Waggl has the opportunity to be as
disruptive of a technology for the enterprise; one that can ultimately
transform how organizations communicate and source intelligence from
their own people. Waggl is a game changer.”

About Waggl

Waggl is the first human search engine for business leaders looking to
surface new ideas or honest input quickly. Waggl provides decision
makers with a fast, focused and engaging way to enable enterprise
communication and crowdsourcing. Unlike online survey tools or
enterprise social platforms, it is designed specifically to surface the
best insights, ideas, solutions and sentiment of a group. Just as
Twitter automated 1-to-many digital communication, Waggl optimizes the
many-to-1 collection and synthesis of valuable insight in real-time.
More than 1,500 organizations today useWaggl’s cloud-based
platform from laptops, phones or mobile devices. Clients include
Domino’s Pizza, Glassdoor, Olympics, Sanofi, Pacific Pulmonary Services
and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Waggl is named after the dance used by honeybees for millions of years
to surface ideas and make decisions, perhaps one of the oldest and most
successful forms of communication and crowdsourcing.

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